Arrived in Narita!

G'day all!

Steve here. Despite fears, we did NOT crash into the Pacific and get eaten by sharks and squid. We'll do that on the way back. This time, the worst that happened was some rather nasty turbulence near the Russian coast. I blame lingering pockets of the Red Menace. In the 50s, weren't they always trying to screw with the weather?

But despite motion sickness and curious in-flight vegetarian meals (e.g., a veggie burger patty with ketchup on rice! Why didn't I think of that?), the flight ended successfully. All of our baggage was waiting for us -- which was only half-expected after some confusion in Vancouver -- and we got waved through customs without incident.

And holy crap, it really is muggy here! We finally stepped out of the airport around 6:00 PM, and standing in the sun was still unbearable. But we got our shuttle to the hotel and are now getting acquainted with wacky Japanese TV. This includes incomprehensible gameshows and news, mostly. And there's Pokemon, but NOT dubbed into English! Hot damn!

It's 7:30 PM local time now, though it feels like about 3:00 AM for us. We'll likely be crashing soon, but first there's some medical guinea-piggery to be done. In preparation for climbing Fuji-san, we got us some nifty pills for altitude sickness. Doses begin tonight to see if we get any colorful reactions. What better place to perform chemical experiments on oneself than a non-English-speaking country? Genius!

My language skills have been fairly useless so far, aside from pleasantries like "hello" and "thank you" and "Do you speak English? Cuz if you don't we're gonna colonize the crap out of your country!" I'm almost totally illiterate, so I'm sure we'll have an awesome time squinting at train station signs tomorrow as we fumble our way to Destination #1: Kawaguchiko, a town cowering in the shadow of Mt. Fuji.

And now, I fear I have little choice but to watch what looks like Japan's answer to Sesame Street. The current item is a stop-motion animation of towels shaping themselves into animals and stealing people's beverages. Needless to say, this blog post cannot possibly keep my attention with THAT as its competition.

Our best to y'all. Give our scritches to any nearby cats.